1. Field
Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to a wireless communication and, more particularly, to association between communicating devices and to ad-hoc directional communication in a contention access period.
2. Background
In emerging wireless communication standards, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.3c standard, a network coordinator scheduling (e.g., control by a piconet controller or an access point) is mandatory to access a medium for any device-to-device communication. However, efficiency of this access can be very low, particularly for data applications with very random and bursty traffic.
A channel time allocation (CTA), which is a time division multiplexing (TDM) based approach, can provide means to support streaming applications with high data rates. On the other hand, the use of large amount of bursty data is not well supported in the IEEE 802.15.3c standard.
The link budget for transmitting high data rates over 60 GHz frequency band supported by standards such as the IEEE 802.15.3c, IEEE 802.11ad and European Computer Manufacturer's Association Technical Committee 48 (ECMA-TC48) requires considerable antenna gain as well as flexibility in the orientation of end-point devices. This directional communication presents a new challenge for devices communicating with multiple peers in multiple directions. Such devices need to be informed in advance to which direction to set their antennas. However, the nature of contention-based traffic is that it is not always possible to know in advance which directions to use, since anyone of the potential peers may gain access to a medium. Several attempts and restrictions were applied in a contention access period (CAP) specified by the IEEE 802.15.3c standard, but none of them provided an efficient solution for this problem.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method to provide efficient ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication in the CAP while ensuring that antenna directions of communicating peers point to each other. Preceding this, it is desirable that peers (i.e., wireless nodes of the network) are associated with the network coordinator.